2013/2014

Jahnavi Phalkey
, Ph.D.

History of Science and Technology

King's College London

Born in India
Studied History of Science and Technology at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Politics of Asia and Africa at the University of London, and Indian Studies at the University of Bombay

Fellowship

EURIAS Fellow

Schwerpunkt

Arbeitsvorhaben

Statistics, State and Society in India

The creation and stabilisation of authority, also of territorial states, by mobilising scientific knowledge, is an important question in the history of science, and we stand to gain a new perspective on these processes by studying India. Theodore Porter, a historian of statistics (and Fellow of this year), has argued that the rise of quantification in social and economic investigation is not necessarily because of its success in the study of nature. On the contrary, he argues, quantification grows from "attempts to develop a strategy of impersonality in response to pressures from outside". Taking Porter's argument as a point of departure, I would like to map the "pressures" that contributed to creating the space, specifically for statistics, and more generally for objectivity and quantification, as obvious strategies to understand and explain the subcontinent.

Recommended Reading

Phalkey, Jahnavi. "Introduction: Science, History and Modern India." Isis 104 (June 2013).
-. "Not only Smashing Atoms: Nuclear Physics at the University Science College, Calcutta, 1938-1948." In Science and Modern India: An Institutional History c. 1784-1947, edited by Uma Dasgupta. New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2010.